Le Tigre create edgy, grooving transmissions that are fashioned at the intersection of punk and electronica. Mixing noisemakers for the new millenium in their rehearsal space-laboratory, Kathleen Hanna [Bikini Kill, Julie Ruin], Johanna Fateman and J.D. Samson trade off sampling guitar wrangling and beat creation duties. Beginning with their self-titled debut, Le Tigre have embraced home recording and electronic manipulation. With their third release, Feminist Sweepstakes (Mr. Lady Records), they've continued their assault on mediocrity with songs that taunt, incite, and celebrate- offering not only sharp cultural critique, but hip-shakin' good time. I spoke with Kathleen and Johanna about their "feminist-electronic-garage music".
What's your songwriting process? Do you generally start with a drumbeat, a riff, or a vocal melody? Or do you jam to come up with something and go from there?
Kathleen: We actually just started incorporating jamming into our songwriting process on this record, really minimally, but the way we typically have started is with a sample. For our first record we would take a whole bar of music or a few bars which included drums, maybe keyboards and guitars, and loop that and then sing over it and work from there and then try to change it up enough so that it wasn't boring.
Johanna: For the first record those long samples were generally done on an Ensoniq Mirage, which is this really old sampler. They are actually crappy- sounding samples because we made such long ones. So the sound of the first record, which to me really characterizes a lot of the songs, are these really stretched out, bad — as in poor, low resolution — samples.
Do you still use that sampler?
J: No.
It bit the dust?
J: It sucks. We both have them in our closets.
K: They're as big as we are and weigh more then we do.
Wow, that's impressive.
K: But we updated to an MPC60 for this album with 8 channels out and an upgrade.
J: The upgrade gave us more memory. It's an Akai MIDI Production Center [MPC], which means it's a sampler and a sequencer in one, so it sequences samples internally to make drumbeats or whatever, but it can also trigger other instruments — it's a MIDI trigger. We actually upgraded before the record because we had to figure out how to produce the music made on our first record live. So it was a ridiculously painstaking process of re- sampling stuff from the Mirage and from drum machines and resequencing it all and now we solved our problem by putting it on minidisc, because why bother? It's still playback, whether or not it's live MIDI or it's on a minidisc.
It seems like you're eliminating some possible hazards too.
K: Definitely. We had stuff break too often on the first couple of tours. For our actual process, the MPC became sort of the center of our songwriting for this album. I got a bunch of weird records from Canada and sampled a bunch of stuff and then shared them with J.D. and Johanna and we'd go, "Oh that drumbeat sucks. Johanna, why don't you take it home and try to make some better drum beats for it" and so she would do that.
J: I think that the revolutionizing step in our collaborative process is that we have matching samplers so we can trade discs and work at home. It seems like that's the way a lot of collaborations work these days with people being able to exchange computer files, Pro Tools or whatever, and that's really exciting. I'm hoping we'll be able to work more like that, even in different formats, like Pro Tools or [Emagic] Logic or [Propellerhead] Reason.
K: It's really collaborative to be doing that, and we have a Tascam DA38 8-track, so as we're working on something we can put it down on a couple tracks of tape and then one of us during the day can be at home working on the MPC and then another can be working on lyrics or adding a guitar part or bass or whatever in the studio. It's cool because we can all be working on the same song at different locations and then come back together. So it's like we electronically jam but we're not in the same room. And it's been really cool that each of us can figure out what we're good at and what we like to do. If right now I'm really into playing guitar, I can do that, and if J.D.'s really into singing and figuring out different vocal melodies, she can be working on that and finding out what her direction is, and Jo got into beats on this record and she was taking stuff home a lot and taking ideas from records and also sampling live drums directly into the sampler and then manipulating them, and she could be doing that and we could all be working on the individual areas we're interested in and then bring them back together.
Yeah, that sounds really exciting because it gives you the opportunity to try different things — you're not only the guitar player or the drummer, you can do any of it.
J: Exactly.
K: And there's no one standing over your shoulder, watching you making all your mistakes. We can do it all in rooms by ourselves and then bring it back and learn how to talk to each other about it — "Oh, I really like that idea you're going with but I'm not quite sure about this one, let me take that home and see what I can do to it to improve it."
And that works pretty well for you?
Both: Yeah.
Do you usually just jump in with a new piece of equipment and play around and push all the buttons, or do you prefer to study the manual before you start?
J: I would say our relationship to the technology up until this point has been on an "as needed" basis. Like we're going to go on tour, so we have to research and find out what equipment isn't going to break, if there will be parts available in any major city, [and verify] that it's a replaceable thing. Questions like that were the guiding factor in getting stuff initially. And for that reason, I have the sampler I have, the Akai S2000 which is a rackmount thing, but which we use in this really simple way. It's just basically a sound bank for a keyboard and it can do so much more, it's a really powerful sampler. So next time I have a couple of months off, maybe I'll figure out what else it can do. And that's kind of exciting. I feel the best way for me to learn how to do something is that I have to figure this out because we have to leave on tour...
K: ...in ten days...
J: ...and it has to work. So that's a really good motivator to open the manual and figure stuff out. Then there's all this other stuff that's possible to investigate later.
Have you found that you've had happy accidents when you've pushed some weird combination of buttons and come up with a really cool thing?
J: Totally. With the Ensoniq it was so random.
K: It was so random that sometimes things would get slowed down when we didn't think they would. Or we weren't able to sample a single note off of a Farfisa, we had to sample a whole riff. So it would kind of change the sound of the music and how we were playing it. But it ended up being really cool.
You recorded the From the Desk of Mr. Lady EP in your practice space and then brought it to Chris Stamey who mastered it, right?
J: Yeah, the EP we recorded in our practice space on an Alesis LX20, 20 bit 8-track [ADAT] and also on Kathleen's...
K: I have a Tascam 388, it's 1/4" tape and it has the tape bed laying down and the mixer as one part. I did a solo record on that and then we've used it a little bit in Le Tigre. We did a lot of stuff on the first record on that and transferred it to digital later. And we did a little bit of the EP on that. The EP was kind of pieced together from stuff that didn't make it on the first record because we needed to improve it. We wanted to make it better — add backups, remix it, change a tempo or whatever. A lot of it we record on our own and then mix somewhere else, which is actually how we did the Feminist Sweepstakes record, but with the EP we mixed a lot of it on our own besides two songs I think, besides "Bang, Bang" and "Mediocrity." We mixed on our own and then had it mastered elsewhere.
So with the new record, Feminist Sweepstakes, was the process basically the same as with the EP or was it different?
K: The difference is that we mixed most of it with Chris, we didn't mix it ourselves.
I think I know the answer to this question but — are you into recording everything dry and then adding effects later?
K: No, to the chagrin of Chris Stamey! I have a Zoom box that a friend got me in Japan for three hundred bucks and it has ninety-nine effects on it. Some of them are called ZZ Top, stuff like that. I got it four years ago when I was doing my solo record, Julie Ruin, which I recorded and mixed on my own on my Tascam, with a little help from my friend Paul. A big part of that record was playing with the Zoom Fire and using effects, because in my previous band I had always done stuff dry and then added effects later and I was always really annoyed by that process, because it made singing not as enjoyable. I really liked how using the effect while I was singing made me sing different. I've tried going through the effects out and then the return, but it always sounds like [the effect is] laid on top and not a part of the actual singing. And also, as a woman, I've had enough bad experiences with men in recording situations that I like to have as many decisions already made before I go into any room with a male engineer — even though Chris is really supportive and awesome to work with. Just from previous bad experiences I like to have made the decision about how I want my vocal to sound [before going into the studio]. That's why I like to have a lot of the vocals recorded before we even get into the mixing situation. So, by having a little effects box I can experiment with I can say, "Okay I tried ten different effects and this is the one I decided on and this is the style I'm singing in."
Is the Julie Ruin project what got you into recording?
K: Yeah. When I was in Bikini Kill I didn't even have a 4-track until our last record, Reject All American, and I remember spending $600 on my 4-track — it cost more than my car and it was a really big deal. I still have a picture of me opening the box. It paid itself off in like two weeks — I recorded stuff that actually got used in a soundtrack for a short video and all kinds of things. But it really became part of my songwriting process then and I just didn't have enough tracks. My friend Paul had the Tascam 388 and I asked him if he'd help me record some stuff on that, and then I got a matching one so that I could continue to work at my house with it. I just got so obsessed with being able to work whenever I wanted, because the recording studio situation is so expensive. Every time Bikini Kill did our records it was basically, "Okay you have seven days to make this album" and we'd have toured the material for a really long time and gotten good at it so we wouldn't spend any money in the studio, we could just go in there and crank it out. It was really fun, but my idea for the first couple of records was to capture the live sound as true as possible — it wasn't so much about using the recording apparatus as a tool, it was just sort of trying to take a picture with as much detail as possible as opposed to trying to make art. Or trying to capture something realistically as opposed to like...
J: A conceptual project in its own right?
K: Thank you, Jo. And so that was what was really great about the Julie Ruin thing. It allowed me to record over a long process of time, which I'd never done. To have the writing process and the recording process meld into one thing was much more spontaneous and immediate. I could get ideas in the middle of the night and go over to the mixing board and just do it. I could do three thousand mixes if I wanted to because the tape was so cheap. I really wanted to gain confidence so that when I did go back into a more fancy studio I could say what I wanted and know what I wanted. It was really about learning what EQ did and what kind of sounds I was attracted to. I figured out a lot — how I like guitars panned, and that I like really trebly guitars, but I also like nice bass on drums and just trying to figure that out and how to communicate it. And now I have the problem that I can't really talk about it as well as I can just reach over and do it. So I want to work with engineers who don't mind me sitting there and fiddling with the knobs when I'm not hearing what I want to hear.
Having access to the equipment all the time opens up a whole realm of possibilities that you don't even think about if you're pounding a song into the ground and getting it perfect in order to go into the studio and record it. It's a different approach that can add to your songwriting.
K: Oh, it's so different, it really is incredible.
J: And I think it adds a lot to our live performance as well, because initially it was frustrating to work backwards from the recordings and say, "Okay, how are we going to do this live?" But it's also kind of liberating in that if no one wants to play guitar on this song nobody has to, it's already sampled so we can just loop it. We can be performance artists, so that when we do play guitar that's in a sense a conscious choice and done for a reason. It's not that we're a "fake" band, but it's like we're choosing to be a band at certain moments and choosing not to be a band at other moments while we're on stage. I just think it's a really great way to work.
When you're approaching a new instrument that you know nothing about you can be really free to play whatever you want.
K: Oh yeah, it seems like people who are just starting on something make the most incredible stuff. They always come up with the bass line that you're like "Whoa. That's a weird rhythm."
J: I think that's another thing too, that when girls ask how we got started making electronic music or how they can learn, I always say it's better to find someone who is at your level and who is also curious about it, or maybe someone who knows a little bit more who can get you started. I just think it's more fun to discover things with someone rather then have someone teach it to you, because especially with drum machines or samplers, there's absolutely no right way to do it. As long as your not hurting yourself or others [laughter] who cares whether or not you're using the "swing function" correctly, you know?
K: Jo and I made a lot of strides with our second set up, when we had the MMT8 and the HR16, these weird Alesis boxes — a sequencer and a drum machine that were really terrible and broke two days before we went to record. We thought we lost all our material, but we had backed it up on a cassette like a day before it broke. We essentially lost our sequences though, so we had to get them back via a cassette tape, which was a really strange, frustrating process. But after we got through that, and all these different hurdles, and realized, "Oh, when something goes wrong we can figure it out, we're really smart." I felt angry that electronic music has been, for the majority of my life, so mystified and taught as being really hard. Because even though it's been a lot of work, it's really easy to make electronic music, it's not that big of a deal, and I just want to get that message out to people — that it's really easy.
J: And home recording for that matter. Whenever people tell you "you really need this" or "you really need that" or "you need to take a college class to understand this or that" you have to look at their value system and the kind of music or art they're involved with and say, "Wait"...
K: That guy likes Slipknot!
J: Maybe that's what I need to make music like that guy, but I'm a "feminist conceptual artist" [laughter] so I can sort of...
K: ...make up my own rules...
J: ...and invent this for myself.
Are there any resources you've found to be particularly good at explaining how things work?
J: Well, we're really into this book called MIDI for Musicians [by Craig Anderton], an excellent book.
K: We're also into the MPC manual, and all products made by Roger Linn, our secret boyfriend.
J: We have these MPC60s with this upgrade that Kathleen mentioned. It's a kit by Roger Linn through his independent company, so I've emailed the people who work there a lot since we have a weird piece of equipment that not many people totally understand the nuances of.
Roger Linn, as in the Linn drum?
J: Yeah, he invented the Linn drum.
K: A lot of great hip-hop records have been made on the MPC60 and the MPC2000, it's just that a lot of people now are using Pro Tools, Logic, Reason, or whatever to make their music. I think it's a cool thing to have [the MPC60] because it references what people are now calling "old school hip-hop" but with the upgrade it becomes a total oddity that confuses people who are trying to fix them.
J: And people are using MPCs to make dance music, drum'n'bass, and house music as well.
K: Or, you know, "feminist-electronic-garage music".
So do you all collect sounds for future use? Do you walk around with a minidisc recorder or tape recorder to capture sounds?
K: We did that for the "Dyke March 2001" song, where we went to the actual march with a combination of stuff like a minidisc with a little mic on it which worked incredibly well. And we had a digital video camera as well. But we haven't done that much field recording, we have a pretty extensive library of '60s and '70s sound effects records that we use a lot.
J: For other sound sources we've gotten more into playing guitar directly into the sampler, or I spent one afternoon just sampling snare hits and hi-hat sounds in my bedroom with a few drums that a friend loaned me, and that's been this incredible library of drum sounds that I made in one afternoon. There's a lot of those on the record and it was so easy, it was just an SM58 and a couple of drums.
Do you have favorite microphones that you use?
J: We have one microphone.
That must be the favorite!
K: We just have a bunch of 57s going though a Zoom box for singing and when we go in the studio we've used some — what I always call the Brenda Lee microphones, big square AKGs or whatever, but I can never remember their names, I can draw pictures of them from memory, but I can't remember their names. I always have to call up Chris and ask, "What was that one you used on my voice for that song?" We just haven't had the money to invest in nice mics but we've borrowed stuff before. That's usually our technique, to borrow a mic and see how we like it. But we haven't found that perfect mic that makes us all sound good.
Yeah, where is that mic?
K: I don't know.
As far as playing live, do you have a truckload of gear to deal with?
K: It's not that big of a deal because our drummer never complains. Ha, ha, just kidding. But these Yorkville speakers that we got...
J: That's a real pain. We have these giant speakers because we've never been able to get a loud enough monitoring system. We need something behind us so that the beats sound loud enough and it sounds like a real show and not just a karaoke night. So we have these giant speakers, but other than that the gear is kind of compact. We have one rack with the minidisc player, the Akai S2000 sampler and a Crown power amp and a mixer for our stage sound.
K: Yeah, we just have a really small Mackie mixer on stage. When we first started we were asking people, "How do you deal with doing sound?" and Atari Teenage Riot told us that they use a little Mackie mixer on stage so we though that might be a good idea. Also, as a way that we could control the sound on stage, because we found that without it the soundperson had a little bit too much control over what we heard. So we split all of our signals between the house and live with DI boxes and we use these two big PA speakers that we travel with as a way that we can hear the samples and the drums. But if you think about how big a drum kit is, and how much room the drummer takes up in the van, it's actually not that bad.
Are you working on new material now?
J: A little bit. Individually we're working, but the record's about to come out so we're...
K: Doing press and all that kind of stuff, taking some time out. I really want to learn Logic and Pro Tools. I know that's a big undertaking, but I'm actually renting a room from this guy in upstate New York so that I can go up there every so often. He has Pro Tools and he said he would teach me a little bit. I want to learn that and do a bunch of songs on it and just write as a way to be alive right now with all that's happening. I want to write without thinking, "Oh this is a Le Tigre song" or this is anything anybody else ever has to hear. I just want to get back to that process of playing music so you feel like you're not going to jump off a bridge.
Do you ever see yourselves recording anyone else?
K: Oh I would love to do that. I really want to record Tami Hart at some point. She's a really amazing singer/songwriter who's on the label we're on [Mr. Lady]. I think that just working with her voice would be really rewarding. I would love to learn more about what kind of mics to use to record certain women's voices. Because I'm a huge sucker for Brenda Lee, Lesley Gore, Mary Wells, just really great women singers, and I'm obsessed with the quality of their voices, so I'd really love to do that. And also to bring the stuff I've learned from being in bands for a long time, the psychology of being in the studio, to use my knowledge of that as a way to make other women feel comfortable in the studio and feel creative as opposed to feeling intimidated and under pressure. I have had great recording experiences with people that were really low pressure and I study how they make that happen.
